When it comes to water, we westerners seem to be a distrustful lot: Water politics in Colorado and in western Wyoming have long been driven by this one, nagging fear: that California was getting something to which it was not entitled – and might get accustomed to it. Squatter rights, if you will, bolstered by …
Continue reading ‘Dipping more drinking straws into the Colorado River’ »
In the western United States, water use and water rights questions associated with Native American communities are a major factor in the region’s future. Under federal law, these communities are entitled to substantial but often unquantified amounts of water. Planning for the future often gets tangled up in these questions. For example: Not all tribes …
Back in the 1950s, the Colorado River, at least a bit of it, used to regularly reach the “Southern International Boundary” – the river bed near San Luis where it stops being the US-Mexico border and travels solely in Mexico. Even during the driest bits, when Lake Mead was dropping during the late ’50s, at …
Those pesky tree ring scientists are at it again, spoiling a perfectly good party. Stephen Gray and colleagues have taken a dig into runoff over the last 1,000 years on three major Colorado River tributaries, adding a new level of granular detail to something that already seemed apparent: Runoff during the 20th century, when we …
There’s a tangent in Henry Brean’s Las Vegas Review-Journal story about desalination and Las Vegas this morning that provides a reminder of just how far we’ve come in the power structure surrounding the management of the Colorado River in the last century. The main thrust of the story is a discussion of the possibility of …
Continue reading ‘A bit of history – when US Colorado River water users feared Mexico’ »
Tony Perry has a nice take-out in the Los Angeles Times this weekend outlining the state of play in discussions over the fate of the Quantification Settlement Agreement and the water deal contained therein between the Imperial Irrigation District and San Diego. It does a good job of highlighting the dilemma – San Diego has …
The scale of the “third straw” Las Vegas is poking into Lake Mead is one of those made-for-journalism anecdotes that tells the story of a great western city’s thirst. The new intake is insurance that Vegas can still get water from Mead if lake levels drop below intakes one and two, a tacit admission of …
With the latest monthly report from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, we now have end-of-water year numbers, and a chance to take stock. It’s been a terrific year for water supply on the Colorado River system: Lake Mead ended the year with a surface elevation of 1,116 feet above sea level, up 32 feet from …
Continue reading ‘There seems to be a lot of water in Lake Mead. Relatively speaking.’ »
Lorri Gray-Lee, who has headed the Bureau of Reclamation’s Boulder City office (the folks with that big dam) is heading to the Pacific Northwest, and Terry Fulp, her deputy, is stepping in as acting chief. This is one of the Bureau’s more important jobs, herding the Lower Colorado cats. Not exactly herding, even. Cajoling. Persuading. …
Continue reading ‘River Beat: Gray-Lee moves on, Fulp steps in’ »
I had occasion this evening to revisit “Sensitivity of Streamflow in the Colorado Basin to Climatic Changes,” by Linda Nash and Peter Gleick, circa 1991: Water availability, quality, and demand may be affected by higher temperatures, new precipitation patterns, rising sea level, and changes in storm frequency and intensity. Water supply and water management in …